a matter of conscience
by Douglas Messerli
Corneliu Porumboiu (screenwriter and
director) Politist, adj. (Police, adjective) / 2009
On the surface of Porumboiu's Police, adjective (meaning, literally,
in one Romanian definition, "a novel or film about criminal
happenings"), not much seems to occur, yet a great many stories get told
in its "cracks," what the director refers to as its necessary
silences.
Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a policeman (the English language equivalent of Politist, adj.) in Vaslui, Romania, has
been assigned a case in which a young stool pigeon (whom he refers to as the
Squealer) has reported that a high school friend has provided him with hashish,
a criminal act. Indeed, through shadowing the high school student, Cristi, he
observes the boy sharing a cigarette with his friends, Alex and a girl several
times between classes; the tested cigarettes prove positive for hashish. In
short, the case is settled nearly before it has begun.
Yet Cristi continues to follow the two boys in an attempt to find the
source, whom he believes to be either the brother of the provider or the
brother of the young girl, who travels out of the country frequently and has
been involved in a drunken accident. Perhaps, as he begins to suspect, the real
"criminal" is the Squealer himself.
This is not everyone's kind of movie. My movie-going companion felt it
was boring and obvious. For in an attempt to uncover the "truth"
about the matter, Cristi must do what he does every day: stand around waiting
for things to "happen," for the three to gather, the girl to visit
her friend, the father and mother to drive off to work and to return home each
evening. For long periods in his film, the director focuses his camera on
Cristi's body beside a pillar of white-sprayed concrete and attached yellow
wood, alternating between this central figure and the gate of the house he
watches. At other times we simply follow the policeman through the streets of
this deteriorating small city. Indeed, the camera tracks him several times as
he returns to his warren of an office and to his small home, which he shares
with his newlywed wife, Anca, a school teacher. For seemingly endless minutes,
we witness Cristi eating, hear his wife play an obnoxious song on her computer
(after which the two discuss whether its lyrics are images or symbols), observe
neighbors and their pets going in and out of a small grocery store, and suffer
a secretary busily clacking away on her computer. In several instances these
clearly represent acts of absurdity, but they also function in other ways.
What struck me about this intense focus on the ordinary, in a film of
straight-forward realism, was just how experimental and fresh those slow-moving
scenes were. Porumboiu, in his beautiful camera positions and images, often
posting the action just outside of the camera's range, creates a world of
people and objects as rich as John Cage's musical silences. The crumbling sides
of buildings, the crunch of stale bread, graffiti painted across a wall say
more about the society in which Cristi functions than a police chase or
exchange of gunfire might ever reveal. Major emotional events are caught in a
single glance or a seemingly offhand remark such as that Anca makes: "I
don't think things are working out between us."
As A. O. Scott intelligently commented in his review of this film in The New York Times: "The more you
look, the more you see: a movie about a marriage, about a career in crisis,
about a society riven by unstated class antagonism and hobbled by ancient
authoritarian habits."
The biggest "action" occurs
when Cristi desperately attempts to search out information on the families of
the two boys and girl, trying to force his bureaucratic fellow workers to do
the very research for which they were hired. Cristi is in a rush to uncover
information before he is ordered to arrest.
When the final showdown comes, it is, strangely, not in the form of a
shouting match, but in a humiliating putdown with regard to the meaning of
certain words. When Cristi refuses to order a sting, insisting it is an issue
of conscience, the Chief of Police determinedly forces him to read the
dictionary definitions of "conscience," "morality,"
"law," and "police," all of which, in his Romanian
dictionary, seem to push away from the simple English-language definition of an
individual's "faculty or power" of "feeling to do right or be
good." For Police Chief Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) conscience is linked to
the morality of laws enforced by the police, and is never open to personal
exceptions. The decision for Cristi is whether he wants to remain a man or a policeman, part of an adjectival force
as in a "police state" or an individual out of a job.
The final scene reveals what we knew all along. Living in the world we
have just witnessed, it is impossible not to have regrets.
Los Angeles, December 4, 2009
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (February
2010) and Reading Films: My International
Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
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